The person described in that Vox article - upper respiratory symptoms, no direct contact with someone with confirmed Covid-19 - wouldn't meet the criteria for testing anywhere that I know of off-hand. Certainly not in the UK or Australia, probably not in South Korea (though they allow people who don't qualify to buy testing out of pocket), not in a whole bunch of EU states, and Italy has much bigger things to worry about. Maybe in the more urban parts of China?
The community spread by this point has hit the entire US surely. They can't track every single confirmed person location-by-location because it's been far too long.
You are wrong about South Korea. Their testing has been incredibly effective from the beginning, patient 31 in South Korea had no known contact and was told to take a CV test by her doctors, but didn't take the advice until a 2 days later.
https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTER...
In my country, you get tested even if you haven't had direct contact with confirmed COVID19, but have the symptoms and have travelled to selected countries or states in the last 4 weeks.
as a non-US person, the US can do much more than testing, (which is what most other countries can do). A cure, or a quick vaccine is what matters, testing is just a measure of how bad you are performing. Containment measures are necessary, and they work, but eventually we ll all get the virus, in a vaccine or not
Not doing any actual airport screening, rejecting the WHO tests so we could develop our own (for some reason), denying that there was even a problem for 4 critical weeks, telling people as recently as a week ago that they should be out going to restaurants and bars... all the failures of leadership that caused us to blow well past containment.
In contrast, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong got right on top of it, and early. They're also the only countries seeing a flat rather than exponential trend right now. Which means their hospitals are not at threat of being overwhelmed.
The president and the most popular news network have been downplaying the severity for weeks. The US is absurdly behind other countries in testing. We've tested less people total than South Korea tests in a single day. And cases are being overlooked left and right. No one I know in NYC has been tested. Multiple folks were in public situations with possibly infected tourists. One was exposed to a confirmed case via a third party and got the symptoms right on schedule. No tests available. Everyone was told they're only testing if respiratory distress occurs and to stay home and take Dayquil.
